EVERYBODY'S BUSINESS

EVERYBODY'S BUSINESS; For Sale: The Ultimate Status Symbol

By BEN STEIN

Published: August 15, 2004

START with the obvious: the government needs money. We are running enormous deficits as far as the eye can see, and this is a constraint on spending for many good causes, including my favorite, military pay raises. Yet there are a great many wealthy people in this astoundingly rich country. There are generally believed to be at least two million millionaires even if the value of a primary residence is not considered, and perhaps as many as eight million if the home is counted. There are more billionaires than you can shake a stick at.

These people are taxed at a much lower level than they were even a few years ago. So they're happy with that. But there is something that rich people want desperately. (I live among many rich people, so just take it from me.) They want others to know that they're rich.

That's why people buy Ferraris and Bentleys and Prada clothes and Cartier jewelry. That's why people travel to Cap d'Antibes and Aspen.

But here is a revolutionary, or maybe counterrevolutionary, way to make one need meet the other: make some slight amendments in the basic laws of this great country and have the government start issuing titles of nobility.

Well, maybe it should be a little more than that. Have the government sell titles of nobility. Look at it this way: In ancient times, kings gave out such titles in return for loyalty in wars or heroism in combat or some service to the state. Times have changed. Now, in Britain, our close cousin and good comrade in arms, titles of nobility are -- and long have been -- handed out for gifts of money to the ruling political party. So many of these were given by brewing magnates that Burke's Peerage, the main registry of nobility, came to be called ''Burke's Beerage.'' This may be changing in the ''Cool Britannia'' of Tony Blair, but the basic principle still applies.

Here in the United States, the government can take ordinary multimillionaires -- shopping-center owners, oil-well owners, real estate developers and plastic surgeons -- and suddenly lift them above the peasants waiting in line at Alain Ducasse or trying to get a ticket to a Broadway opening.

Suddenly, a Joe Blow who developed a skin-care line that sells and is a nobody in Biloxi can -- for, say, $10 million -- be Baronet Blow of Biloxi, entitled to the homage that a title brings. Dr. Morton Cooperman, orthodontist to the stars' children in Beverly Hills, can for $5 million be Sir Morton of Crescent Drive.

The way I see it, the really big titles, like duke, will go for, say, a billion dollars -- chump change to a Microsoft zillionaire. From then on, he can join an incredibly select few who can call themselves dukes -- and whose wives can ask for hair appointments for Duchess Ballmer of Seattle. A title of marquess may cost $50 million, and earl, say, $10 million, and maybe lowly millionaires can become knights for just that paltry mill.

I don't see this system giving any special legal rights to the new nobility. There would not be a House of Lords, for example. We already have the United States Senate, a very rich man's club. This system would sell just prestige, but on a huge scale.

And it would recognize a fact that is already glaring: In large measure, the country is already an aristocracy. Rich men and women, and the children and spouses of rich men and women, already get the plum schools and the plum cars and can run for national office. Indeed, in this election, for the first time that I can think of, there is not one candidate on the ticket of either major party who does not have at least $10 million in the bank -- and three of the four went to Yale.

I'm not saying the nonrich can't amount to anything: look at my homies Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. But the odds are long and getting longer in favor of the rich. Let's just recognize it and make some money off of it. The nonrich won't be prevented from seeking high office, and they can even make capital out of being working people without titles. But for those who want to be recognized for having made money or having inherited or married it, there will be that special fillip of vanity that only a title can bring.

And on the other side of the deal, the military people who risk their lives to keep this great system going -- a system that lets the sons of mill foremen become multimillionaires by arguing in court and allows bureaucrats to become wildly rich running oil-service companies -- can get a pay raise.

The old idea that nobility is merely ancient riches sanctified is true. But why should it be only old riches? And why not put it to good use and recognize where we are as a nation, aristocracy-wise?